What is this exactly? Whiteboard Friday warning about footer links.
-
Hi guys.
I've just been watching this whiteboard Friday. At 2.01 mins Rand mentions something about a penalty that Google gives for certain internal linking practices. I'm a little confused about it.
Something along the lines of... 'stuffing keyword rich anchor text in the footer and nav bar'
Does Rand mean repeating keyword rich anchor text in these areas?
Or just that it's stuffing by nature... because it's on every page of the site?
Hope that makes sense.
I've attached a screen shot of our footer. Could you let me know if this is bad form?
Thanks in advance
-
Understood, and thanks! Really appreciate your time Rand!
-
If they're keyword rich and manipulative in nature, then yes, they could get you penalized. If they're more "accidentally" keyword rich because that's what the pages are called, you're probably fine. For example, if Moz happened to have a page called "SEO Tools" and it was linked to in the footer of our site, no big deal. If, however, we had "SEO Tools" | "SEO Software" | "Check SEO Rankings" | "SEO Guide" | etc. that would be more likely to get us in trouble.
-
Hi Rand, thanks so much for getting back to me again.
I think we may be cross purposes here. Ha. Just to be clear I was just asking purely about internal links in the context of your WBF here. (2 mins specifically)
The basic question is: Can keyword anchor text in footer links (naturally) linking to other relevent pages on our site induce any kind of penalty? Due to the fact they are on every page does this look 'spammy' or intentionally manipulative?
(I feel I may have got the wrong end of the stick here tbh).
-
Header? It's pretty unusual to have or to get an external link in the header (most users assume, accurately, that headers are internal navigation).
If you're talking about internal links, no problem! Footers, headers, sidebar navs -- all are expected to have sitewide links. We're just talking about external links that can be perceived as link spam.
I also did a WB Friday video on this that should be going up in the next few weeks with more detail. Basic story in your case is, if the links are internal, and they're not spammy-anchor-text/intentionally manipulative/hidden from users/etc, you should be just fine.
-
Thank you Rand! Just a quick follow up if I may?
So should we worry about this in our header section also?
We know from Hotjar that our users find the header Nav useful to really fine tune their search for our products... Week view diaries, day per page diaries, 30, 20, 15 mins appointment diaries etc.
Seems like a crazy penalty (even if they have revoked it now). I mean we just added this for UX Blagged.
-
Yep! The sitewide link penalty, also commonly known as the footer link penalty or the "web design by" penalty is a pretty common (though not 100% universal) link dampener. Google mostly just ignores those links now, but they sometimes used to actively penalize for their presence (and may still in certain cases). My best advice is to instead link from your about page or another well-linked-to page on your site vs. linking from every page.
-
Great question, maybe a Mozzer will jump on for more clarification, but I believe Rand was referencing doing the "repeating footer links", as in having many footer links with exact anchor text or anything similar. A "sitewide link" that is simply just one link at the footer, often used by web development or design companies, will not get you a Google penalty. With that being sad, footer links, especially, sitewide ones, do not carry much value for increasing rankings. They can be good for referral traffic though. Hope this helps and best of success!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Link to webdesign bureau in footer on follow or nofollow
As we are growing fast, more and more websites go online. When they do, we always put a link in the footer which says: ‘Webdesign by Conversal’. But this is creating a substantial amount of backlinks to our root domain with the same anchors. Recently, we’ve moved our websites to different servers to spread the risk of a server crashing. I think Google now sees the backlinks through different IP’s as artificial, not natural, while Semrush and Moz are giving us a toxic score. What is your advice on this? Will we need a ‘no-follow’ attribute to each link on every website? Or could we better write a small case article for each client, where we can link to in the footer?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | conversal0 -
Any idea why Google Search Console stopped showing "Internal Links" and "Links to your site"
Our default eCommerce property (https://www.pure-elegance.com) used to show several dozen External Links and several thousand Internal Links on Google Search Console. As of this Friday both those links are showing "No Data Available". I checked other related properties (https://pure-elegance.com, http:pure-elegance.com and http://www.pure-elegance.com) and all of them are showing the same. Our other statistics (like Search Analytics etc.) remain unchanged. Any idea what might have caused this and how to resolve this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SudipG0 -
Hammered by Spam links
When we moved from one host to another in Wordpress engine, we had this insertion weird redirect thing happen. We 410'd the page cgi-sys/movingpage.cgi, but it hit us hard in the anchors. If you go to ahrefs, we are literally all Asian in anchors text. Anybody have any suggestions, thank goodness it looks like it finally stopped. I am looking for creative ways to repopulate our back end with the right stuff. Any thoughts would be great! Heres a example: allartalocaltours.com/tumi-tote-401.html ↳customerbloom.com/cgi-sys/movingpage.cgi ↳www.customerbloom.com/cgi-sys/movingpage.cgi ↳lockwww.customerbloom.com/cgi-sys/movingpage.cgi
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mattguitar990 -
Software to Analyse Bad Links
Is it possible to get a pretty good idea of my site's link profile by merging the link data from Google Webmaster Tools, MOZ and SEMRUSH (backlinks). I would think that combining the linking domains from these three packages would create a pretty good profile. Once I create a list of domains that link to my site is it possible to run them thru MOZ so as to evaluate their quality? Last year I paid a reputable SEO firm to run a link analysis, process link removal requests and finally a disavow, only to see my domain authority decline from 33 to 24. So I am leary of the process. That being said I have reviewed the disavow file that was submitted last year and still see about a third of the low quality domains still linking to our site. Alternatively is it worthwhile to run a link detox report. Maybe it is worth biting the bullet and spending the $175.00 dollars to run a report. Our site (www.nyc-officespace-leader.com) does not have too many links so maybe I can research this manually. Thoughts???
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
Unpaid Followed Links & Canonical Links from Syndicated Content
I have a user of our syndicated content linking to our detailed source content. The content is being used across a set of related sites and driving good quality traffic. The issue is how they link and what it looks like. We have tens of thousands of new links showing up from more than a dozen domains, hundreds of sub-domains, but all coming from the same IP. The growth rate is exponential. The implementation was supposed to have canonical tags so Google could properly interpret the owner and not have duplicate syndicated content potentially outranking the source. The canonical are links are missing and the links to us are followed. While the links are not paid for, it looks bad to me. I have asked the vendor to no-follow the links and implement the agreed upon canonical tag. We have no warnings from Google, but I want to head that off and do the right thing. Is this the right approach? What would do and what would you you do while waiting on the site owner to make the fixes to reduce the possibility of penguin/google concerns? Blair
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BlairKuhnen0 -
To Many Links On Page Problem
Hello My Moz report is showing I have an error for too many links on my sitemap and blog. The links on both pages are relevant and I'm not sure if this has to be sorted out, as I would have thought Google would expect sitemaps and blogs to have lots of links. If I were to reduce the number of links how much of a positive affect would it have on my site? If any of you feel it is best practice to reduce number of links on these particular pages, do you have any suggestions on how I can tackle this? http://www.dradept.com/blog.php http://www.dradept.com/sitemap.php Thank you Christina
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ChristinaRadisic0 -
Links from tumblr
I have two links from hosted tumblr blogs which are not on tumblr.com. So, website1 has a tumblr blog: tumblr.website1.com And another site website2.com also uses the a record/custom domains option from tumblr but not on a subdomain, which is decribed below: http://www.tumblr.com/docs/en/custom_domains Does this mean that all links from such sites count as coming from the same IP in google's eyes? Or is there value in getting links from multiple sites because the a-record doesn't affect SEO in a negative way? Many thanks, Mike.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | team740 -
Exact domain or subfolder?
If I am targeting a specific keyword, from an SEO perspective is it better to create a subfolder on a url that has some authority or is it better use the exact domain with no authority? For example, if I want to target the word 'widgets' which is the better choice and why? **Choice 1: ** www.domainwithauthority.com/widgets Note: this domain has 1000 links to it **Choice 2: ** www.widgets.com Note: this is a brand new domain with 0 links
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mnipko0